How to be productive when you work at home

Posted by Chhavi Agarwal on May 18th, 2019

Do you work from home?

If you do, you will understand and appreciate why I’m talking about the importance of being productive and how to achieve it.

I have been working from home for the last 7 years now and in my experience being focused, dedicated to your work and being productive is extremely challenging when you have to do it on your own.

Given the challenges, one need’s help of tools to achieve the desired target.

I am going to discuss a few tools which can make your life easier.

Project Planning & Collaboration -

Asana and Trello are web-based project management and collaboration tool which helps you with planning your entire your project on a single platform.

Both of these tools have boards, lists, and cards. You can create cards, keep in a to-do, progress and do as you like.

You can also move these cards to different boards and assign it to your colleague if you are working in a collaborative environment.

Using a project management tool helps you to organize your tasks, follow up and visually see the progress in entirety.

You are not limited to just Asana/Trello, there are more free project management tools available to choose from.

Tracking Time -  

When you work as a freelancer from the comfort of your home, scheduling work is up to you.

This freedom of working when you want to is exhilarating but it can backfire too.

Having a time tracking tool tackles this situation and helps in not overloading yourself with work.

Harvest, toggl, top tracker, rescuetime and focus me are few free apps to keep you on the right track.

Distraction -

When I first started working from home, phone and TV were the worst distraction for me.

The reason for getting distracted from work may differ for each one of us but it's important to get rid of these distractions to increase productivity.

I don’t take calls from friends and family during working hours(unless its an emergency) and call them back when I’ve time.

I also used to watch a lot of TV series, I’ve completely stopped that and now I record my favorite TV shows and watch it when I’m free from work.

There are a lot of apps like Freedom, self-control, focus booster, and brain.fm to boost your productivity and let you focus on your work.

Health -

Health is wealth is an age-old old proverb.

As freelancers, we spend a lot of time inside our houses sitting on that chair working long hours.

Ideally, one must watch their eating habits and go to the gym regularly but if you are not a gym person, go for a jog to clear your head, it really helps.

Smartphone these days come with health apps and one can make use of them. If you are not interested in the default app, then you can take a look at these apps myfitnesspal, yoga studio and map my fitness which will keep you in shape.

Check out my blog Mrs. Daaku Studio to know more about working from home and remote job options